Music review: So Percussion, ACME and yMusic showcase new sounds

This was a concert rare in its delightful excellence, and consequently a hard act to follow, and neither ACME nor yMusic could quite manage to do it. These groups are part of the generation after So Percussion, young New Yorkers who merge in various combinations — three of the performers were in both ensembles, including the violist Nadia Sirota, a somewhat ubiquitous figure on New York’s contemporary scene these days. They’re ambitious and full of ideas, but — particularly after the crackling precision of So Percussion — they seemed a little callow, and their presentation fell back on the dutiful “Here’s a piece by X, and now here’s a piece by Y.”

ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) was represented by five performers and some not-very-strong music; the pieces might have benefited from better playing, and the players might have risen to the occasion with better pieces, but the combination was unsuccessful. Caleb Burhans, a talented composer who’s proficient on several instruments, was not quite proficient enough on violin to animate either Don Byron’s “Spin” (played with Timothy Andres) or John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts — a slow and spare piece that can be quite beautiful but that here seemed dreary. The last piece, a string trio by Mick Barr called “ACMED,” offered fast playing to counterbalance the slow, but it didn’t have a lot of content, either.

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( Janette Beckman / ) - The New York quartet So Percussion was the standout among new-music performers at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

yMusic, a sextet that adds flutes, clarinets, and trumpet or horn to the string-trio mix, represented a step up in the quality of both performance and music. I particularly liked Sarah Kirkland Snider’s substantial “Daughter of the Waves”; was bemused by Jeremy Turner’s faux-Romantic “The Bear and the Squirrel”; and liked the drive of Judd Greenstein’s “Clearing, Dawn, Dance,” which concluded the evening. This music is available on yMusic’s CDs, but as Sirota, perhaps the best player on the stage, mentioned offhandedly, the group’s record label, the enterprising New Amsterdam Records, was devastated in Hurricane Sandy, and its CD stock was destroyed. Sirota didn’t mention the label by name, but anyone really interested in this kind of music should go check out yMusic’s Web site and think about ways to help — even if this particular concert might not have sparked as much interest as it should have.